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What’s hot – the ten best-selling physics books

06 Jul 2000

Having just scooped this year’s Aventis Prize for Science Books, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe shot back to the top of the best-seller list of physics books for the month of May at Amazon.co.uk, the on-line bookstore. First published over a year ago, Greene’s masterful introduction to string theory was praised by the chairman of the judging panel Lewis Wolpert as “Science as magic. At last somebody has managed to explain a new fundamental theory of everything.”

Richard Feynman makes two appearances in the top 10 – with The Pleasure of Finding Things Out in second spot and The Meaning of It All in seventh place. Also in the top 10 is Stephen Hawking’s ever-popular A Brief History of Time, which has sold an estimated 25 million copies since it was first published over 12 years ago. Another thoroughbred still selling well since it first hit the bookstores in 1984 is John Gribbin’s lucid survey of quantum theory In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, while the ever-popular Chaos continues to earn royalties for science writer James Gleick 13 years after it first appeared.

Newcomers in the list include The End of Time, in which the stay-at-home Oxfordshire physicist Julian Barbour argues that time does not exist, and The Odd Quantum – a non-mathematical introduction to quantum theory by the late Sam Treiman. Writing in Physics World Asher Peres called it “a wonderful guided tour through quantum mechanics, [which I recommend] without hesitation to every physicist”.

1 The Elegant Universe (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Brian Greene (Vintage) pb

2 The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Richard Feynman (Allen Lane The Penguin Press) hb

3 A Brief History of Time (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Stephen Hawking (Bantam) pb

4 The End of Time (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Julian Barbour (Phoenix Press) pb

5 Hyperspace (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Michio Kaku (Oxford Paperbacks) pb

6 In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (Amazon, Amazon UK)
John Gribbin (Corgi) pb

7 The Meaning of It All (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Richard Feynman (Penguin) pb

8 Chaos (Amazon, Amazon UK)
James Gleick (Minerva) pb

9 Lucifer’s Legacy (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Frank Close (Oxford University Press) hb

10 The Odd Quantum (Amazon, Amazon UK)
Sam Treiman (Princeton University Press) hb

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